Imagination alters everything

Ted Hughes and place

Janne Stigen Drangsholt

pp. 125-139

in: Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald, Terry Gifford (eds), Ted Hughes, nature and culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

This chapter investigates the significance of time and place in Hughes's poetic imagining of England and the English landscape, and examines whether it can be viewed as a form of gathering which not only extends into a past, re-collecting what Seamus Heaney, in his essay "Englands of the Mind", refers to as "communal ways' and confirming "an identity which is threatened", but also reaches into a future for which it collects and stores meaning. What is more, the paper also aims to examine this act of gathering as a vertical movement, which reaches into the deep that is also England, in the form of a place that is mythical, religious, and, as always for Hughes, acutely immanent.

Cited authors

Heaney Seamus